There’s a truly diverse spread of Facebook campaigns on our roundup this week. JetBlue uses Facebook’s Places in combination with its frequent flyer program, Coffee-Mate gives away product and coupons, Zynga partners with Kia and SocialVibe in a new branded game and CBS and Ubisoft work together to pair-up the CSI TV show and game during sweeps.

Zynga, SocialVibe and Kia’s Big Game Tournament

Goal: Engagement, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Game Interaction

Core Mechanic: Kia is partnering with SocialVibe to sponsor Zynga’s new Big Game Tournament by placing content about its new Kia Optima car model in several of Zynga’s games.

Game: Zynga’s Big Game Tournament has partnered with Kia Motors America and SocialVibe from Jan. 24 through March 5 to allow players of Zynga’s games — Farmville, Petville, Mafia Wars, and Café World — to gain access to exclusive Kia content and receive Zynga cash in return.

Method: By clicking on the Kia icon at the bottom of the game page for the aforementioned Zynga games, players will be directed to a virtual football game featuring teams of characters from their favorite Zynga games. During this virtual football game players will be greeted with interactive Kia Optima content, have the chance to share this experience on Facebook or Twitter, and finally receive Zynga cash. Specifically: 4 Pet Cash for PetVille; 2 Farm Cash for Farmville; 1 Café Cash for Café World and 2 Reward Points for Mafia Wars.

Impact: Kia’s Facebook Page is rather small, but the landing tab also promotes the Optima. Gaining access to Zynga’s 200 million monthly active users via its most popular social games is sure to give a boost to Kia, which has actively promoted its models on Facebook with video ads in the past.

[Courtesy Image]

Coffee-Mate’s Free Flavor Friday

Goal: Network Exposure, Engagement, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: Offering fans a free $1 off coupon for a Coffee-Mate purchase on the Facebook Page via app after an email address is requested.

Method: The Free Flavor Friday started out as a one-time offering of 100,000 free bottles of Coffee-mate, but due to the success of the campaign, the company added another 20,000 bottles. When the demand continued, the company decided to offer more coupons to its Facebook fans for $1 off a bottle of the coffee creamer. Getting a coupon is as simple as entering your email address, users do not have to Like the Page and coupons are printed directly off the Facebook Page.

Impact: The Page currently counts more than 254,200 Likes and at least 120,000 people have used the Facebook Page to receive a free bottle of product. What’s more, the Page’s Wall posts frequent updates of technical difficulties, so it seems there was a lot of enthusiasm from consumers. Thus, the simple campaigns seems to have been rather effective.

What are today’s most effective Facebook marketing best practices, and which campaigns have profited most? Visit the Cases section of Inside Network’s Facebook Marketing Bible for the full summary.

Now that Facebook has grown to nearly 600 million monthly active users, which platforms will offer new and emerging opportunities for social game and application developers in 2011? We examined the scope of new opportunities – both on existing platforms targeting a specific audiences and on potential new platforms from Google and other internet giants – at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011.

Manu Rekhi, GM Games & Platform at MySpace, Carey Kolaja, Senior Director of Digital Goods Operations at PayPal, Geoff Cook, CEO at MyYearbook, and Dennis Ryan, EVP Worldwide Publishing at PopCap Games joined Crossover Technologies’ Eric Goldberg to discuss opportunities, risks, and timelines associated with emerging platforms. View the full talk below.

ISA 2011: New and Alternative Social Platforms – Where Are the Biggest Opportunities? from Inside Network on Vimeo. To download an mp3 version of this talk, please email us at info (at) insidesocialapps (dot) com.

Other videos currently available:

• ISA 2011: The Future of Social Gaming, Key Questions for 2011 & The Emerging Media Landscape
• ISA 2011: Fireside Chat with Google’s Eric Chu on Android’s 2011 Social Roadmap
• ISA 2011: The M&A Landscape for Small and Mid-Sized Developers
• ISA 2011: Monetization & Customer Acquisition on the Facebook Platform in 2011
• ISA 2011: Fireside Chat with Bret Taylor on the 2011 Facebook Platform Roadmap

Photos of the event are viewable on our Facebook Page.

Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network.

Inside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms, and virtual goods.

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

• ISA 2011: Photos from Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011

Monday, January 31st, 2011

• Shooting Monsters on iOS’s Warrior Nation-Gunner Loses its Thrill
• Android Upstages Nokia’s Symbian in Global Smartphone Shipments
• New Facebook Deals Page Offers Promotion Locator for Users and a Guide for Admins
• Booyah Lays Off 13 Employees After Traffic for Nightclub City, MyTown Fades

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

• Sony App Rejection Signals Stronger Enforcement Around In App Purchases
• Capcom Mobile Serves Up the Undead on iOS
• ISA 2011: Fireside Chat with Google’s Eric Chu on the 2011 Android Social Roadmap

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

• Another Way of Slicing the Android, iOS, RIM Horserace: Facebook Monthly Actives
• Google Lets Consumers Download Android Apps Through New Web Store
• After Months of Delays, Google Finally Announces Support for In App Payments
• Apple Tries to Control In App Purchases as They Gain Traction on iOS

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

• New Hires in Mobile Gaming: Big Fish Games, EA Mobile, Flurry, & More
• The Last Defender Doubles Up on Monetization on iOS
• Another Facebook App for iPad Is Growing: Touch HD

Friday, February 4th, 2011

• Color Hypnotizes Players in Infinity Field on iPad
• Mobile Gaming Roundup: Flurry Grows, Instapaper Founder Praises Apple’s Review Process

Inside Social Games

Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

• ISA 2011: Photos from Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011

Monday, January 31st, 2011

• PlayFirst Finally Brings Diner Dash to Facebook
• Applifier Adds Retargeting to Its Cross-Promo Bar
• Uncle Pennybags Gets a Makeover as Mr. Monopoly in EA’s Monopoly Millionaires
• ISA 2011: The M&A Landscape for Small & Mid-sized Developers [Video]
• Poker and Drawing Show Promise on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

• Mososh Brings More RPG Originality to Facebook with Chronicles of Herenvale
• Top 25 MySpace Games for February 2011
• Booyah Lays Off 13 Employees After Traffic for Nightclub City, MyTown Fades
• Top 25 Facebook Games for February 2011
• Lolapps and Zynga Add TrialPay’s Credits Shortcut, Implement “Frictionless Credits”

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

• Monsters, Fantasy, and Fashion Shine on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• Amid New Competition, Game Cross-Promotion Service Applifier Raises $2M, Expands to Web
• A Look at Long-Running Facebook RPG, Age of Champions
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, Gaia, Meteor Games, & More

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

• Redundancy Squelches Potential in Knight’s Quest on Facebook
• Designing Games with Massive Social Data
• New Hires in Social Gaming: Digital Chocolate, GSN, Loot Drop, & More
• ISA 2011: The Future of Social Gaming, Key Questions for 2011 & The Emerging Media Landscape
• Zabu Studios and Reiner Knizia Roll the Dice with Pickomino

Friday, February 4th, 2011

• Familiar Titles Dominate This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Localization Is More Than a Game
• Facebook Posts Implementation Details for Frictionless Payments and Buy With Friends
• Social Gaming Roundup: Hackers, Dragons, Revenue, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, January 30th, 2011

• ISA 2011: Photos from Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011

Monday, January 31st, 2011

• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Bud Light, Dentyne and New Belgium Brewing
• Badoo Booms, So Do All Sorts of Other Apps on This Week’s List of Top Facebook MAU Gainers
• The Facebook Marketing Bible February 2011 Edition is Now Available
• Facebook Deals Launches in Europe with Modest Promotions
• Facebook Spent $130,000 on Lobbying in Fourth Quarter, Up Threefold From Year Earlier
• ISA 2011: The M&A Landscape for Small & Mid-sized Developers [Video]
• New Facebook Deals Page Offers Promotion Locator for Users and a Guide for Admins
• Facebook Introduces a Credibility Score With New Social Commenting Plugin

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

• Facebook App Video Chat Rounds Adds Random Chat to its Suit of Games and Screen Sharing
• Top 25 Facebook Games for February 2011
• ISA 2011: Fireside Chat with Google’s Eric Chu on the 2011 Android Social Roadmap
• Gogo Inflight Internet Tempts Users to Pay by Offering Free Facebook Access
• Lolapps and Zynga Add TrialPay’s Credits Shortcut, Implement “Frictionless Credits”
• Facebook Page Management Company Acquisitions Could Continue Through 2011

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

• Android, Foursquare, Microsoft Lead in This Week’s List of Top Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• GraphEffect Secures $2 Million in Funding to Expand Its Facebook Ads API Services
• Facebook Deals Also Now Available for Windows Phone 7 and in Canada
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Digital Chocolate, Games Cafe, & More
• Soft-World Brings Pre-Paid Cards for Facebook Credits to Key Chinese-Language Markets
• Appssavvy, ValueClick and More Networks Join Facebook’s Ad Providers Whitelist

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

• Hearsay Social Helps Corporations Manage the Facebook Pages of Their Local Branches
• Another Way of Slicing the Android, iOS, RIM Horserace: Facebook Monthly Actives
• Facebook Career Postings and Jobs: Real Estate Counsel, Policy, Asia, Mobile, Strategy and More
• ISA 2011: The Future of Social Gaming, Key Questions for 2011 & The Emerging Media Landscape
• Facebook Connect Integration Best Practices From the Platform Showcase

Friday, February 4th, 2011

• Facebook Will Allow Users to Watch and Vote on Super Bowl Commercials
• Connect Integrations, Games and Poker on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
• Momentus’ Community Health Grader Scores Facebook Pages on Engagement
• Facebook Implements Page Wall Post Comment Spam Filter
• Free Facebook Credits Will Expire February 15th for Some Users
• Facebook Roundup: Birthday, Congress, New HQ, Privacy, Deals, eBay, Gmail, and Messenger

Facebook Turns Seven Years Old – This year the social network grew from a single contained website to a framework for social interaction that is integrated across the web thanks to the Open Graph and social plugins. The Like button gave people a way to structure their affinity, and discover they weren’t alone in appreciating something. Facebook had success with new products such as its location-service Places, while others products such as Groups and Deals are taking longer to catch on. It executed major revamps of its Photos and Messages products that are still being rolled out, and its virtual currency Facebook Credits was adopted by the Platform’s biggest developers.

Some speculate it has grown to 600 million monthly active users from 375 million last year. It became the most visited website in the United States, and Wall Street has taken notice, with the company’s valuation soaring to $50 billion. Perhaps most importantly, though, is that it continues to redefine the way we communicate and share such that it is seen  as a utility instead of a piece of content that could be grown tired of.

Congressmen Badger Zuckerberg Over Users’ Mobile Numbers - Co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus sent Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter with 11 questions regarding Facebook’s recent move to let developers access users’ mobile numbers. In essence, the politicos want to know more about the thought that went into the feature, and whether users can retrieve this information after the fact.

Facebook Announces New HQ - Facebook announced it would hold a press conference on Feb. 8 to discuss moving its headquarters from Palo Alto to Menlo Park, Calif. The former Sun Microsystems 22-acre campus near the Dumbarton Bridge will become the new Facebook HQ. [Image Via Facebook]

Facebook Outlines Privacy, Innovation Goals - Facebook’s Chief Privacy Counsel Michael Richter wrote a 14-page letter to The National Telecommunications and Information Administration regarding a recent report from that agency about commercial data privacy and innovation on the Internet. Richter outlines Facebook’s goals, specifically ensuring that privacy protections benefit users and the necessity for privacy frameworks to innovation.

eBay Hires Away From Facebook – eBay hired away former Facebook research scientist Dennis DeCoste, who worked on ad matching, search ranking, link recommendation and spam detection, according to AllThingsD. He will now be eBay’s director of research.

Gawker Redesign All About Facebook - Gawker’s redesign went live this week on three of its affiliate blogs and Facebook is the only social media widget included next to stories. Gawker CEO Nick Denton said Facebook is the biggest social source of traffic for the blog network.

Facebook Ambivalent About Role in Uprisings - Facebook officials are carefully trying to balance the way users leverage Facebook to protest their governments with the way the company must play nice with government officials to gain access to those markets.

Rapportive Debuts Deep Gmail Integration - Rapportive, a Y Combinator startup, updated its Gmail add-on this week, reported Mashable. The add-on allows users to see social information about people who send them email, request email contacts as friends, see contacts’ Facebook updates and photos, and Like updates and comments from within an email.

2.8 Billion Minutes of Facebook Chat Via Messenger - Windows Live reports this week that its Messenger service now powers more than 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chat via 18 million users. The integration has grown 75% since November when we last wrote about it, and amounts to 440 million chat sessions. Windows is also powering up its LinkedIn, MySpace and YouTube chat integrations.

Buddy Media By the Numbers - Buddy Media COO Kass Lazerow posted a blog this week about the company’s growth in 2010. The company raised $23 million in Series C funding, partnered with WPP for $5 million more, hired 90 more employees and moved to an office three times as big as its previous space. Seven of the top 10 global advertisers use Buddy Media’s Platform to manage their Facebook presences, the company counts more than 600 clients, the record for the most comments made on a single status update via the Buddy Media Platform was 8,300, 97% of the content managed by the company is fan-generated, and the average number of responses per status update is 39.

BraveNewTalent Raises Capital - Social recruitment application BraveNewTalent secured an undisclosed amount of funding this week, according to TechCrunch. The venture capital funding from Northzone Ventures, Pierce Casey and Mike Bourne is set to be used to hire and focus on the U.S. market.

Storify Raises $2M - The social content curator Storify raised $2 million in funding from Khosla ventures, reports TechCrunch.

Facebook distributed free Credits last summer to increase awareness of its new “universal” virtual currency, but is now informing users that these promotional Credits will expire on February 15th, 2011. Users who received free promotional Credits but never spent them are seeing a notification informing them to use their Credits before they disappear.

The expiration will please developers because they can’t redeem free Credits spent in their games for cash from Facebook as they can with traditionally purchased Credits. However, it will also anger some gamers who will feel ripped off.

Last June, Facebook began offering users 5 free Credits for installing Crowdstar’s Hello City game. The promotion was designed to familiarize users with the Credits system and maintaining a balance. It also helped make them more comfortable spending Credits. This would benefit developers in the long run, but also led to an immediate loss of revenue. It expanded the promotional Credits more broadly in the weeks afterward.

Since then, Credits has matured and is now the exclusive direct payment method for 22 of the top 25 Facebook games, including those from Zynga, Disney/Playdom, EA/Playfish, and many others. All developers will be required to switch to Credits on July 1st, 2011.

Some developers reported that up to 70% of the Credits being spent in their games were promotional Credits that didn’t earn them money. This led some developers to increase prices to exclude those users with only small number of promotional Credits.

Other developers were impacted less, with only .05% to 15% of incoming Credits being promotional ones. Still, Facebook has been trying to improve its standing with developers, and removing free Credits from the virtual economy will accomplish this.

Facebook’s Help Center has details about the free Credits expiration. Purchased Credits won’t be affected, and users can keep any virtual goods they”ve bought with free Credits before February 15th. Facebook protected itself from legal challenges to the expiration by changing its Payment Terms in September to include the statement “If you receive free or promotional Credits, we may expire them at any time.”

Facebook tells us that users will see a combination of notifications, home page ads and canvas navigation reminders that their credits are expiring until February 15th. It’s possible that Facebook will seed users with free promotional Credits again in the future, though for now its focusing on offering discounts on in-game purchases made with Credits through the new Buy With Friends deal sharing system.

Facebook now turns spam and unrelated comments on Page posts gray to denote them as low quality to admins, while leaving the blue background on other comments. This passive spam filter is applied to new comments on old posts, but hasn’t been retroactively applied to old comments. The filter will make it easy for admins to quickly sift through thousands of comments and delete spam.

In most cases, grayed out comments won’t appear to other users. However, if a user follows a link to a friend’s spammy comment from that friends wall, the comment will appear. If a Page admin doesn’t agree that a grayed out comment is spam, they can click the ‘x’ next to it and select “Unmark as Spam” to return it to the standard blue color. With time, this should teach the spam filter to be more accurate.

Comment spam is a serious issue. The site’s most popular Pages, including Facebook’s own, see the comment reels on their posts filled with links to unrelated Facebook pages, money making scheme sites, and malicious software downloads. Spammers hope to piggyback on the reach of these Pages, which must fight such attacks with around the clock human moderation and Page management tools that flag or delete suspicious comments.

Facebook introduced a Spam tab to Page walls in October that pulls out spam posts from users, but it didn’t address spam comments. Facebook also recently began testing a Top Posts filter for Page walls which brings user posts with many Likes and comments to the top of the stack.

All of these efforts are designed to promote quality conversation and make browsing Page walls a safer experience. If brands can be sure their Page walls won’t hurt their reputation, they’re more likely direct users to their Facebook presence, and pay Facebook for ads that drive traffic there.

Page management company Momentus Media recently released Facebook Community Health Grader, a free, easy-to-use web-based app that “grades” a Facebook Page on the engagement of its fans. The tool serves to attract Page admins to the Momentus site where they can learn about the company’s services.

Users enter a Page’s URL, and the site calculates total Likes, and comments, Likes, and community wall posts per day Momentus’ Health Grader awards a percentile and letter grade of success. You can also see how your Page compares to other Pages in the same category.

The most telling statistic may be admin posts per day. As Page unlikes are relatively rare, there’s little danger in Page admins posting too often as long as they have compelling content to share. Andy Carvin, NPR’s social media strategist, said that even posting ten times a day didn’t cause a significant increase in unsubscribes, but did expose content to more users and helped Page growth. If admins see their posts per day is below 1, they should definitely consider posting more.

What’s interesting about the concept of the Health Grader is that while user stats-based apps are common on Facebook, it’s somewhat rare to see this applied to Facebook Pages. These types of tools follow the trend of many Twitter grader apps, but since fewer Facebook users are actually Page admins, there’s less potential for viral growth.

Ultimately the tool gives a good and quick overview of Page health, but doesn’t provide the detail of Facebook Insights or other more comprehensive pay-for-service programs. For more information about Page management companies, check out the service provider index that’s part of the Facebook Marketing Bible, our all-inclusive guide to marketing on Facebook.

Several Connect integrations topped our list of AppData’s Top 20 emerging Facebook apps this week. The Huffington Post, Wikia and Hulu were on top of lots of games and a few poker apps. In particular, The Huffington Post grew by more than 550,000 users this week for 134% growth, community knowledge site Wikia grew substantially by 460,300 users and video site Huly by 319,700.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Huffington Post	962,740	+551,024	+134%
2.	Wikia	540,033	+460,331	+578%
3.	Draw My Thing	852,034	+346,577	+69%
4.	Hulu	348,574	+319,773	+1,110%
5.	Salon Street	619,880	+304,247	+96%
6.	Bandsintown	847,249	+299,383	+55%
7.	Kebap Dünyası	387,318	+268,625	+226%
8.	Dog Show Friends	555,717	+243,400	+78%
9.	Friend Characters	580,632	+234,137	+68%
10.	Джезве / Cezve	567,876	+225,365	+66%
11.	Birthdays Reminder	664,372	+222,911	+50%
12.	เท็กซัสโป๊กเกอร์	312,593	+217,473	+229%
13.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	741,359	+214,658	+41%
14.	Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Game	292,218	+210,239	+256%
15.	PyramidVille	326,431	+208,564	+177%
16.	Pawn Stars: The Game	245,887	+194,081	+375%
17.	Touch HD	230,000	+178,483	+346%
18.	Pizza World	543,484	+173,377	+47%
19.	SpeedDate	889,239	+171,837	+24%
20.	AddictingGames	358,500	+168,490	+89%

Bandsintown is an app for music lovers and musicians that allows you to either post or follow music activity. The app has a Last.fm, Pandora, iTunes and Twitter integration that provides lots of opportunities to set the user up with bands to follow. The app boasted almost 300,000 users this week, a 55% gain.

All manner of games were popular on the list this week. There were virtual world games like Salon Street, Turkish Kebap Dünyası, Dog Show Friends, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Game, PyramidVille in French, Pawn Stars: The Game and Pizza World. Other games included Friend Characters, which creates photos for your profile and Addicting Games, almost like a clearinghouse of different apps and games. Check out our sister site Inside Social Games for more details.

Birthdays Reminder customizes calendars with Facebook friends in Valentine’s Day themes. One interesting way the app builds traffic is that, when it publishes the photo album with your customized calendar, each and every one of your friends is tagged in the month they have their birthday. This, in turn, alerts one’s friends about the app — the aggressive virality of the feature appears to be a platform policy violation.

SpeedDate, which was on our list last week, was also growing a lot this week, counting 889,200 users; the app sets users up on “speed dates” on Facebook to chat. There were also a few poker apps that grew about the same amount this week. Texas Poker in Thai showed a 229% growth this week with 217,500 users, and The Pokerist Club, which showed a gain of 41% with 214,700 users.